“…our souls remain hovering over the places where we once enjoyed ourselves” Kahil Gibran
After winters thaw it is the bubbling sound
drawing me up the steep slope
that patch of mountain I call my own
surely as if I drove a flag into the ground
and staked a claim. I’ve heard the trees
playing the wind, witnessed forsythia
praying on their knees. I have scythed a path
hurled stones, dislodged boulders
with a great grunt and a crow-bar
the way my father taught me
that summer at the lake
when the birch was still a sapling
and time had yet to carve a map
upon his face, we unhinged stones
from mountain beds, drizzled them down a hill
exploding lilac and clover.
We set rocks where soil was slipping fast
cemented our days into stone
that still retains the summer.
Today ankle deep in muck
that oozes into my sneaker
I am raking winters rot
and discover under wet leaves
a lush patch of strawberries
summer at the lake
and you father
cemented in my bones.
***
Marion Goldstein is a psychotherapist who lives and practices in Montclair NJ . Articles she has written have appeared in several professional journals and she contributed a chapter to Life Guidance through Literature, a text published by the American Library Association. She is an adjunct professor at Caldwell College where she teaches a course in Poetry Therapy.
Her poetry has been published in several literary journals. Her chapbook Blue Prints was published by The New School Chapbook series. Her chapbook Psalms For The Cosmos was published by Pudding House Press and most recently several of her poems have appeared in Preaching The Poetry of The Gospels and Science as Sacred Metaphor published by The Liturgical Press. She is currently at work on a memoir, Hard to Place: A Spiritual Journey through Adoption. Her e-mail address is miggold@aol.com.
